Dance for Me, Darling
by Elodie.Haven
Summary: Dancer by day, whore by night, slave every waking moment—a battered and bruised Eponine takes the stage nightly among the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet as a golden-haired man watches every performance from the front row. Eponine/Enjolras one-shot.
1. Chapter 1

**Dance for Me, Darling**

_Dancer by day, whore by night, slave every waking moment—a battered and bruised Eponine takes the stage nightly among the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet as a golden-haired man watches every performance from the front row. Eponine/Enjolras one-shot._

_This is an AU one-shot that takes place in 19__th__ century Paris, just to clear things up. It's partly inspired by Carolyn Meyer's wonderful novel Marie, Dancing, which in turn was inspired by Edgar Degas' famous sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. I don't own the statue or Les Mis. If I did I'd be dead. I think that is clear._

_Enjoy, and please review!_

…

She dances for Azelma, whose crippled hands marred the stage for a night or two before she was turned away into the sleet and slush. Azelma, whose ribs and collarbones threaten to break through her graying skin. Azelma, whose cough grows worse daily. Who needs a shawl. Who needs bread.

She dances for Gavroche, to whom she slips a crust or two when she passes him on the street, if she can afford it. And the sad truth of the matter is that she dances for her mother, long lost to absinthe, and for her father, for the belt he uses to beat her if she doesn't bring him what he wants.

When she dances, it is Azelma's haunted eye and Gavroche's chapped hands she sees in the mirror. When she sells her body afterward, it is the little pocket of memory, pure and radiant, she keeps hidden in her heart, that fills the night.

Marius Pontmercy has never come to see her dance.

…

The man the girls like to call Apollo comes nightly. His dark clothing blends into the dimness of the theatre so perfectly that she can't tell if he's well-dressed or not.

She catches herself wondering one day when she's trying to mend her tattered bodice, and reminds herself she doesn't care.

…

When she leaps, she is weightless. But it's mere milliseconds before the heaviness in her chest drags her down. The blood-soaked tips of her dance shoes hit the floor and she absorbs her wretchedness, broken, wingless, before wandering off stage into hell.

She's been going to the foyer de la danse since she was eleven, twelve at the most. On her thirteenth birthday, she started counting the men on her skin. One scratch for each. She stopped soon, though. It was simply too hard to dance on legs riddled with holes. Too hard to scrub the blood from the tattered ribbons she binds around her ankles. Besides, they want her pretty. Her broken teeth and her bruises are quite enough without her adding to them.

…

A bit of hard bread soaked in coffee in the morning before rehearsal. A meandering walk through the streets with her hands clenched around her blouse and shawl, stiffening in the cold, between ballet class and her nightly performance. A knife hidden in her skirt to slash the faces of the rapists who won't pay, her fingers slipping into a pocket here or there. Hiding behind silk and face paint and dancing for a crowd that sees the epitome of elegance, never noticing the growing bit of deadness inside her, or the way her ribs show through her bodice. Lying silent and still and half-dead beneath a man with a penny or two in his pocket at night. Sleeping with her hand clenched around Azelma's.

The Opera's biannual examinations. Measly wages that, combined with her father's conning and her thievery her mother's work as a washerwoman and her income as a prostitute, pay the rent.

This, combined with the brunet boy at the Musain, is her life.

…

She meets Apollo's eyes one night. When she leaps, she hangs in the air a second longer than normal. She doesn't drop her head the instant the curtain falls, but lifts her chin for just another moment.

…

And then, one day, Marius comes, with an insubstantial blonde thing on his arm. That night, she steals a bottle from her mother's stash and loses herself. Azelma holds her in their shared bed, feeling instinctively that something's wrong. She dares not cry, for her father will hear. Instead, she clutches onto her sister, trying to convince herself that it would be a very bad idea to find a bridge and jump.

…

He smiles at her one night as she extends her arm towards him, lost in the motion, separated by the stage and the orchestra and the aisle and a universe or two. The smile has the appearance of marble cracking. She has to remind herself that she's in love with Marius.

…

With harsh mockery and a threat or two, she protects the blonde girl she now remembers from her father's gang. She doesn't cry afterwards, but it's a close call. Perhaps a tear slides down her cheek, stinging the open gash beside her lip, courtesy of her father, while she stitches the pointe shoes she'll have to make do with tomorrow at rehearsal, but if so she doesn't remember the next day.

…

And then, during rehearsal, she falls. One minute, she's struggling again to stitch together the shoe that has been worn a dozen times too many, shivering in the thinness of her bodice. The next, it's her turn on the floor, and she's listening to the harsh crack of the ballet mistress' voice in her ear. And then she's tangled on the ground and her ankle is on fire.

Examinations are approaching. Azelma's stopped working long ago, too sick now even to rise out of bed, too sick to survive another beating or another winter without a blanket.

She needs a promotion.

So she dances that night through the pain, smiling to the audience in their jewels and silks and furs, pretending to be an angel, the ultimate lie.

…

For the first time, Apollo joins the men looking for whores in the foyer. She sees him, awkward in the corner, as she brushes her scraggly curls over her shoulder and wraps her shawl around her bony form. She feels her world crash down around her feet again. She thought he was different, a god on earth.

He approaches. She thinks of Azelma, and doesn't shrink away. And when he's just a few feet away from her, she recognizes him.

"You're Marius' friend," they both say at once. Her voice cracks. His doesn't, but she gets the feeling, suddenly, that he is more scared of her than she is of him.

"I come to watch you," he says, after more than a moment of awkward silence.

He extends a hand towards her. She begins to weep.

Somehow, she finds herself in his stiff marble arms.

_Yesterday I was alone_

_Today you are beside me_

_Suddenly I see_

_What I could not see_

_Something, suddenly, _

_Has begun._


	2. Chapter 2

**Continued upon request ;). **

**I do not own **_**Les Misérables, Marie, Dancing, **_**or **_**Vincent.**_

After that, she dances for him. For the boy with a man's pistol hidden in his apartment who never has anything to say to her. She dances for him because Azelma's short miserable life was snuffed out by the coldest day of winter, and because she hasn't seen Gavroche in weeks. Because the threat of a broken belt buckle or the promise of the dregs in her mother's bottles are not enough to inspire perfection and the arch of her frozen feet _en pointe._

One day, he asks to draw her.

"You want to do _what_?"

He repeats himself.

"You're an _artist_?"

He nods.

"Well, you learn new things every day," she says, and chuckles hoarsely. The smell of alcohol hangs in the air between them.

…

She poses for him, out of place among the simple luxury of his apartment, its wide windows and rich carpets and monstrous fireplace. He pays her so generously that she starts hiding in the studio, chewing on stolen apples, instead of going to the foyer at night. She wonders if that isn't the whole reason he's doing this. He has books to read, speeches to write, a revolution to run. And although he's more talented than anyone she's ever met, his pencil hesitates above the surface of the paper before each stroke appears. An artist, indeed.

She studies the sketches he crumples and tosses away, tracing her fingertip across the arch of the subject's brow above her wide eyes, the indentations cut deep into her lower back, the indefinable grace with which she holds fingers that almost seem to move. He has made her beautiful.

Every afternoon, she stays a little longer, wondering if he'll ask for more from her. But he never so much as glances her way once he's finished drawing, and she ties her blouse around herself with shaking fingers as he shuffles his papers and turns away.

She sits on his windowsill, one bare leg dangling out into the cold, looking out over the city. Silent and watchful, she lets her eyes roam around the city and marvels at how the snow masks the filth of the streets beneath this blanket of purity. She rests her head against the frame and laughs at the thought of the people rising.

_Paris' angel from hell could tell you a thing or two about your revolution_, she thinks, still laughing.

One day, she brings a pair of shoes with her and begins to tug and tuck, her needle clutched clumsily between her fingers.

"Can you dance at all in those?"

She starts, then recovers. "Not well," she admits. "We're given shoes to wear for a dozen performances and use the cast-offs for rehearsals. I'm going on eleven with my current pair, so I can throw these out in two days."

He marvels at her pretty French, the educated cadence of her voice.

…

When she steps outside the next morning, it is to find a perfect pair of satin shoes outside her door.

…

"You followed me?" She shrieks at him, and throws the unused slippers at his feet. "You _stalked me home?" _

"No," he says calmly. "No, I didn't, let me explain—"

How different things would have been, she will think later—when she's nursing his child or scattering flowers over the ground where he first touched her because she's not sure where his grave is—if she had only listened.

But she doesn't. She runs from him on bare feet and dances until her tattered shoes are soaked in blood and pus.

_Starry, starry night_

_Paint your palette blue and gray_

_Look out on a summer's day_

_With eyes that know the darkness in my soul_

_Shadows on the hills_

_Sketch the trees and the daffodils_

_Catch the breeze and the winter chills_

_In colors on the snowy linen land_

**Please review!**


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